Swatch The girl who loved color

Swatch is a color tamer in a land where colors run wild. She fearlessly teaches them to dance, do magic, and come when she calls because Swatch loved color and color loved Swatch back. One day, it occurs to her to try collecting the colors in jam jars Rumble-Tumble Pink, Bravest Green, In-Between Gray and soon she has an entire room of colors. All except for Yellowest Yellow, which politely refuses to be captured, before roaring forth in all its glory, sweeping up Swatch and reminding her that colors are wild indeed. In this energetic celebration of color, bright paint swirls and splats every page. Denos combines watercolor, pen, ink, and pencil for a playful and textured effect that pops on white backgrounds. Kids will enjoy joining Swatch on her color hunts, naming all the hues they see, and reveling in the descriptive language (bloomed, swirled, billowing, etc.). The story is slight but exciting, and perks up what might be an otherwise tame lesson on color.--Smith, Julia Copyright 2015 Booklist

Swatch is a color whisperer. On bright white backgrounds, "in a place where colors ran wild," Swatchskinny, almond-eyed, and peach-skinned, with a striped shirt and ever changing headbandstames swaths of color as if they're animals. She bends and leaps, creeps and crouches; she stands on a fire hydrant and stretches impossibly upward to reach inky blue sky. Colors gush and burst around herare they emanating from her hands and brushes or borne on the breeze? She hunts them wherever they are: "Bravest Green shot up the first week of March," while "In-Between Gray lived on her kitten's leg." Denos' text is fierce and crisp, her color-characters wondrous. Using a tight range of hue with spellbinding shapes and textures in watercolor, ink, and pencil, she creates a blue squall swirling with movement, simultaneously watery, sharp, and gusting. A yellow yawns and billows, part wind, part fox, part sunlightbut also purring and buttery. Despite Swatch's label as a "tamer," the colors all live free, visiting her of their own accord"until the day she lured Just-Laid Blue straight from its nest and into a jam jar." Now she's trapping colors in glass jars, where they circle restlessly. But Yellowest Yellow, the last uncaptured color, shines bright on a sidewalk flower; they converse, and Swatch remembers about freedom. For color wranglers and windblown spirits everywhere. (Picture book. 4-7) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.